I read with interest Mr. William EuDaly’s guest column, “Congress, President should take a stand on gun control,” in the Jan. 9 edition. What was even more interesting was its juxtaposition to the article on page 4A which stated that the leading cause of death for teens in the U.S. is motor vehicle accidents.

My question is: must Congress and the President take a stand on the leading cause of death for teens in this country? EuDaly asks: “Why do we allow such horror in our country?” I submit that the actual horror is the hysteria being whipped up by the Fourth Estate over Sandy Hook.

While the parrot cry of “responsible gun ownership” is oft heard these days, the idea that there is such a thing as “responsible media-ship” seems out of the question. “Feeding the Machine” and driving ratings as high as possible are the only aspects of “responsible media-ship” that seem to be important.

Demonizing gun owners is wrong. And make no mistake, that is what is going on. It is easy to say the issue is about guns because guns aren’t people and don’t speak. What anti-gun messages don’t like to bring up is that, in the end, the issue isn’t about guns, it’s about gun owners. Guns are not going to walk themselves to a place to be seized, their owners are.

Guns are not the ones whose rights will be trampled upon; it is people, gun owners, whose rights and property will be taken by the government. Given the estimate that 52 million American households own guns, the chances that a mass murderer is among them are comparable to the odds of winning the lottery.

And based on that minuscule probability, people like EuDaly would characterize all gun owners in the country as evil people who are ready to kill anyone and everyone. It’s sad that such fear and hysteria has been instigated by the media and that intelligent people fail to recognize such blatant propagandizing.

The fact that the number of weekly preventable child deaths exceeds the Sandy Hook death toll is never explored in the media. And when the American people fall prey to this misplaced prioritization foisted upon them by the Fifth Column, they are giving away the greatness of our nation.

The political opportunism being used by numerous politicians to chip away at yet another part of our Bill of Rights is another horror in the aftermath of the situation.

In political science, there is no universally accepted definition of “government.” However, there are clearly accepted indicators of what constitutes the government. One of these indicators is the monopoly of force.

When American citizens are no longer permitted to own guns, we may have government of the people, and, possibly, government for the people, but government by the people will be gone. I think Abraham Lincoln would be horrified at that prospect.

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